[-empyre-] New Sonic Paths and the legacies of NetNoise.:

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi, everyone,

Following the wake of last month's discussion of theory in the networked
domain, we're very pleased to bring resonance to that discussion by
focusing this month's -empyre- discussion on New Sonic Paths.  Renate and
I are looking forward to hosting many old friends and collaborations in
discussion with many voices that will come to -empyre- for the first time.
 We hope that this SONIC theme also will resonate with the -empyre-
community and result in a wonderful sonic babble.

I'M in Hong Kong this week and took an early morning run along what ended
up being a literal sonic path.  I realized that I was moving through an
invisible environment of the sounds of cicadas but packaged in the eerie
sonic envelope of a highway traffic on one side of the running path and
commuter trains on the other.  It was as if the body of the weary global
traveller was being carried along and propped up by the eco-techno sonic
combines that networked the techology of fast-moving transportation
systems into the constant hum and natural rhythms of insect culture.

This dissonance, or rather, this harmony, reminded me of the discussions I
had a decade ago with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker as we planned our
special issue of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA on NetNoise
(http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/four.php).  For our purposes, and
something worth discussing this month, is how the aural environment of the
eco-system is transplanted in the "manifold soundings of art on the Net."
For the curatorial statement of this issue of noisy net.art, Arthur,
Marilouise and I wrote in part about "a sound of wireless motion and dark
noise.  The surging sound of coding, networking streaming and file-surfing
 The almost undectable whispers of splicing, mixing and mutation noise
into a brilliant tattoo on the skin of the digital.  The viral backbone of
digital culture, NetNoise sounds the electronic pulse of connectivity, the
babble of chat, the pings of hits, and the silence tracking of
back-orifice hacking."

How appropriate that I returned from the ciccadian rhythms of life on the
transportational Hong Kong bike path into the sound controlled quiet of my
air-conditioned high rise hotel to read news accounts that Google, the
source of my mobile email, is now blocked in neighboring China due to the
silent tracking of back-orifice hacking meant to counter networked
celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiannanmen Square
Uprising.  The theoretical issues of ex-communication discussed last month
here take on the political realization of Sonic Paths in the Age of
Digital Political Resistance.

Looking forward to a wide-ranging discussion this month.

Tim




Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 6/3/14 9:14 AM, "Renate Terese Ferro" <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------